For collaboration we have set up an infrastructure like version control, the bug tracker and of course this wiki for documentation. These assets are essential for Joomla! development. Below you will find links to the infrastructure that is used within the Joomla! project.

Introduction

The main responsibility of the Development Working Group is taking care of the development of the Joomla! application framework and the Joomla! Content Management System (CMS). Besides the development of the Joomla! codebase the development working group defines the Joomla! roadmap strategy, creating (architectural) designs for major and minor versions and of course take care of bug and security fixes in maintenance versions.

The development working group holds two teams: the Development Team and the so called Bug Squad. Both teams have a separate responsibility but together they form the development force for the Joomla! project.

Joomla! is as every other open-source project based upon the fundaments of collaborative and is a community-driven project. This means that the software, the documentation, the ever growing number of available the extensions, support (forum, mailing, lists newsletters, user groups are collaboratively produced by users and developers all over the world.

In this section of the documentation wiki we have tried to describe all relevant aspects to Joomla! development. OUr effort strives to be as complete as we can be, but we don't rule out that information you are looking for is not (yet) documented. We encourage everyone to help completing the documentation effort and maximize the community effect within the Joomla! project.

Getting started

The amount of information that is available from this page is like a small (e-)book. We tried to organize the information in a logical order, and also structure the information in the most efficient way. To prevent you from reading for some hours, we use a simple documentation method. Per topic we draft a short description on the information that can be found, and in the linked pages we will provide as much as possible detail. Keep in mind that you can use the free-text search or the generated table of contents for this documentation category to find your information. If there is information missing, feel free to add this within this wiki.

Technical infrastructure

For collaboration we have set up an infrastructure like version control, the bug tracker and of course this wiki for documentation. These assets are essential for Joomla! development. Below you will find links to the infrastructure that is used within the Joomla! project.

Coding standards

Writing secure Joomla! code

Unit testing within Joomla!

The goal of unit testing is to isolate each part of the program and show that the individual parts are correct. A unit test provides a strict, written contract that the piece of code must satisfy. As a result, it affords several benefits. Unit tests find problems early in the development cycle.

In computer programming, unit testing is a method of testing that verifies the individual units of source code are working properly. A unit is the smallest testable part of an application. In procedural programming a unit may be an individual program, function, procedure, etc., while in object-oriented programming, the smallest unit is a method, which may belong to a base/super class, abstract class or derived/child class.

Ideally, each test case is independent from the others; Double objects like stubs, mock or fake objects as well as test harnesses can be used to assist testing a module in isolation. Unit testing is typically done by software developers to ensure that the code they have written meets software requirements and behaves as the developer intended.

Ground work on the implementation of unit testing has been done by Enno Klasing during the Summer of Code 2007 project and has been perfected by Alan Langford from the Joomla! Development Team. The way Unit Testing is implemented within the Joomla! project has been documented in the Unit Testing chapter.